When Apple added the Reading List feature to Safari I wasn't too impressed as I didn't use any of the applications such as Instapaper before and I still don't. Then I realized their was another use for Reading Lists.

Instead of just using Reading Lists to save, lets say a news article you were reading and couldn't finish, you can use Reading Lists as a way to temporarily bookmark a page without making a true bookmark. Since the Reading List feature just saves the link to the page it can be very useful.

An example is doing research and instead of making bookmarks and folders and what not holding the links to the research and then later having to delete it from your bookmarks just add the links to the Reading List. Since the links will remain in the reading list until you clear it out they won't be added to your bookmarks and when you're finish using them just clicking the 'x' on each one or clicking clear all will remove them, make it easier to manage links to pages for research and so on.

[crarko adds: This is one of those things that seems so obvious once you know about it, but is a little subtle if you don't. I have lots of unorganized bookmarks from old searches for projects and I'm going to try this idea in the future.]

Hint Options

Click here to return to the 'Another use for the Safari Reading List' hint

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10.7: Another use for the Reading Lists
Authored by: stableos on Sep 19, '11 11:42:07AM

I have started using reading list frequently for queuing up lots of pages to read instead of having tons of tabs open. I find it cleaner and easier to find the page I want later. I got tired of the "Add to reading list" secondary click. It's the last item on the list and I can't figure how to make it the first item. A quick method is to control click a link - it adds that page to the list with a nice animation to boot.

10.7: Another use for the Reading Lists
Authored by: Scottie on Dec 29, '11 09:10:48AM

It's actually shift click that will animate to the glasses button (reading list) and drop a link in reading list. ctrl click just brings up the contextual menu on Mac OS X. cmd click will animate to the download button and download the link.

10.7: Another use for the Reading Lists
Authored by: dogboi on Sep 19, '11 01:00:57PM

That'll work, and I used to is Read It Later for the same thing (I use Instapaper to store the stuff I want to read). There are better solutions, though.

The first is just to set up a temporary folder in your browser, and bookmark stuff there. The second is to use a bookmarking service like delicious or pinboard, and just create a special tag to check it later (in fact, pinboard has a built in tag for that: readlater). The third option is to use Quiet Read, which is a small app built exactly for that purpose. (http://bambooapps.com/free-stuff/). It's free (though there's a pro version).

If you use Chrome, you can also use TooManyTabs and shunt things away for later. :-)

Another use for the Safari Reading List
Authored by: everkleer80 on Sep 26, '11 07:06:31AM

I also recently started using the reading list for temporary bookmark storage. I like this hint because it's nice to be reminded of these things, but you mention this as 'another use'... I'm slightly confused because I thought this was what the reading list was for... If this is 'another use,' what is the first use?